Installation

Connect to the wrong Oracle schema

When having two sonarqube schemas on the same Oracle instance, especially if they are in 2 different versions, SonarQube can get confused and picks the first it finds. In that case, there are two known workarounds: 1. Remove the DBA rights to the sonarqube users in Oracle 2. Set the sonar.jdbc.schema property in sonar.properties to the right schema (same thing on the analyzer side: sonar-runner.properties or pom.xml or ...)

Cannot connect to MySQL database

By default, remote access to MySQL database server is disabled for security reasons. If you want to remotely access to the database server from the Sonar Maven plugin, you need to follow this quick guide.

Failed to start on 64-bit Windows 7

If you have installed a 64-bit version of the JDK or JRE, and Windows is using the 64-bit version by default, then the batch file windows-x86-32\StartSonar.bat will not start the server because the wrapper.exe program called by the batch file cannot load the lib\wrapper.dll library. You can check which version of Java is being used by opening a shell and typing "java -version". If it is a 64-bit version you will see something like "Java HotSpot (TM) 64-Bit Server VM" in the description. You can download a 32-bit version of the JDK or JRE from Oracle and install it. By default it will be installed under C:\Program Files (x86)\Java. Open up a command shell and change to the top-level directory of drive. With "dir /X" you can list the shortened names of the directories. You want the shortened name of the C:\Program Files (x86) directory, or wherever the 32-bit version of the JDK or JRE was installed. You can then add some lines like the following to the StartSonar.bat batch file to put the directory containing the 32-bit version of java.exe in the beginning of the PATH:

Failed to start on Windows Vista

SonarQube seems unable to start when installed under the folder "Program Files" in VISTA. It should therefore not be installed there.

Failed to launch the SonarQube service on Windows platform with a LocalSystem account

This error happens when the temporary file path specified for the Local System doesn't exist. Assuming that environment variables have their default settings and that Windows is installed on the "C" drive, the following paths should exist:

In most cases, the "Temp" folder is missing and should be created. See SONAR-2660.

Failed to start SonarQube with Oracle due to bad USERS table structure

When another(s) USERS table exists in the Oracle DB, if the sonarqube user has read access on this other USERS table, the SonarQube web server can't start and an exception like the following one is thrown:

See SONAR-2549. To fix this issue, the rights of the sonarqube Oracle user must be decreased to remove read access on the other(s) USERS table(s).

Failed to connect to update center via proxy

Double-check that settings for proxy in file sonar.properties are specified correctly. Note that if your username contains "\" (backslash), then it should be escaped - for example username "domain\user" in file should look like:

Analysis

What is the difference between org.codehaus.mojo:sonar-maven-plugin and org.codehaus.sonar:sonar-maven-plugin?

Here is the rational: SonarQube needs a Maven plugin to perform analysis of your project. This plugin is part of SonarQube project so the name of this plugin is org.codehaus.sonar:sonar-maven-plugin because codehaus is hosting the project. Each time there is a new version of SonarQube, there is a new version of the Sonar Maven plugin. For a given version of the SonarQube server, you MUST run the same version of the Sonar Maven plugin. It means that you would have to run:

if you have installed SonarQube 2.5.As this is very annoying to type, you could add the groupId in your settings.xml. This way you could type:

BUT in this case the latest version of the Maven Sonar plugin would be taken. As soon as SonarQube 2.6 would be released, Maven would automatically use the plugin in version 2.6. If you don't plan to upgrade your SonarQube server, it will fail. The answer to this problem is already well-known: define all versions of your plugins in the pom. So you would add:

in all pom (or in corporate pom). And you would have to update your projects each time you are updating SonarQube server. Very annoying but that's not all.What if you have an integration/acceptance/pre-production instance of SonarQube in version 2.5, and a production version in version 2.4? You can't analyse the same project with the two instances because you have fixed the version of the sonar Maven plugin to version 2.5 in the pom. You may finally make it works with external properties or any other ugly hack.

The solution is to use a bootstrap plugin. This plugin:

is hosted in org.codehaus.mojo groupId in order to save the settings.xml configuration

is supposed to be very stable (ie do not change for each SonarQube server release)

When you run

Maven understands:

. The bootstrap plugin will query SonarQube server to find its version, then fork a new build to run the normal plugin with

where XX is the version previously returned by the server. This way you can analyze the same project with different versions of SonarQube and still running the same command line (except SonarQube hostname of course) and without having to modify the pom.

Most of the time you need latest version of the boostrap plugin, so no need to fix its version in your pom, except if you want to test a particular version (an old one or a SNAPSHOT for example).

Cobertura exception on Linux System while accessing the cobertura.ser file

When reading the cobertura.ser file, the Cobertura Maven plugin tries to get a lock on that file. This locking mechanism generates an exception on Linux Systems SONAR-172.

The current workaround is to add the following lines to the pom.xml file (thanks to Wouter de Vaal):

The plugin 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-sonar-plugin' does not exist or no valid version could be found

If you get this error message after launching the maven command line "mvn sonar:sonar" add the "-U" parameter to the command line. Maven will then update its local repository with the latest version of the Sonar Maven plugin.

If adding the "-U" parameter doesn't fix your issue, you've certainly encountered Maven bug MNG-4001. The only known workaround is to delete the org\codehaus\mojo directory in your local Maven repository. Of course, if your local Maven repository is synchronized with a repository manager like Nexus, this operation must be also done on the repository manager side.

Maven fails with an OutOfMemoryError

Increase the maven available memory by setting the environment variable :

Maven fails with a SecurityException

The message of the root exception is

The CGLIB library available in your Maven repository is certainly signed which is not the case on IBIBLIO repository. Perhaps you or your Maven administrator have signed this jar to include it into a Java Web Start application. Unfortunately signing CGLIB jar file breaks Hibernate's use of CGLIB, as it generates proxy classes in the same package (org.sonar.commons.database.* for our context) as the original class. But the original Sonar class is not signed and the new proxy class is, generating a java.lang.SecurityException.

You must also sign Sonar libraries in your Maven repository or used unsigned CGLIB library.

Maven fails because of Maven Enforcer violations

You have to add the parameter -Denforcer.skip=true to the Maven command-line.

Failed to resolve stax2-api artifact

The following error occurs when using Maven Archiva 1.1. It must be upgraded to 1.2.1.

INVALID HASH

While running an analysis, you may face the following error:

It means that the analyzer encountered an issue while downloading the plugins from the SonarQube server to the machine running the project analysis.

This error could be due either to:

A connection issue with the SonarQube server. Check with your network administrator.

A user quota issue. Indeed, by default, all the plugins are downloaded to the local space of the user running the analysis. Some companies set restrictions in terms of local user space, hence the issue. The workaround is to set the "SONAR_USER_HOME" environment variable on the machine running the analysis to a directory with enough available space to download all the plugins.

A corrupted local cache due to a corruption while downloading a file. Delete the local cach (or at least the failing directory) and run again the analysis.

General

Failed to analyse a project as another analysis on the same project seems to be running at the same time (SonarQube 3.4 only)

In SonarQube 3.4 (SONAR-3306) a new semaphore mechanism has been introduced to prevent launching several analysis on the same project in parallel. But in some cases when an analysis of a project is unexpectedly interrupted, the lock of the semaphore is sometimes not released and in such case it's up to the System administrator to relaunch the project analysis with the property sonar.forceAnalysis=true. This limitation has been fixed in SonarQube 3.5 (SONAR-4053).

How to remove false positive issues?

NOSONAR

You can use the mechanism embedded in rules engine (//NOPMD...) or the generic mechanism implemented in SonarQube: put //NOSONAR at the end of the line of the issue. This will suppress the issue.

SuppressWarnings

The //NOSONAR tag is useful to deactivate all rules at a given line but is not suitable to deactivate all rules (or only a given rule) for all the lines of a method or a class. This is why support for @SuppressWarnings("all") has been added to SonarQube.